Re: attribution of ++ to the wrong variable in "a ++b"

[Ed Morton]

On 9/13/2022 5:42 AM, Pascal Maugis wrote:
> Hi, as promised here is the strange, unexpected behavior of ++ that 
> looks like an error to me, because in "a ++b", a is incremented 
> instead of b. "a b++" and "a++ b" produce the correct results however :
>
>    touch a.awk
>    gawk -D -f ./a.awk
>    eval "a=1 ; b=2"
>    eval "print a ++b"   ; output = 12 : (variables will be incremented
>    after the operation, ok with me as documented)
>    eval "print a b"     ; output = 22 : a has been incremented instead 
> of b
>    eval "print a++b"    ; output = 22 :
>    eval "print a b"     ; output = 32 : a has been incremented
>
> The operation seems to be interpreted as "a++b", the space been 
> uninterpreted as a separator
Pascal - with a few exceptions, white space generally doesn't matter to 
awk. If you want to ensure that `a ++b` gets interpreted as `a (++b)` 
then that latter is the code you need to write since once you 
remove/ignore white space `a++ b` and `a ++b` are both `a++b` which 
visually could be interpreted either way.

    Ed.